]]>Out of nowhere, from the back seat of the car, Dubsie yells “wrecking balls inside my brain!” and when we turn to look she grins like she’s done something awesome.

We look at each other and mouth the question — where did she get that? — and our sweet family drive is suddenly tainted by this disoriented feeling. Guilt crossed with confusion, like your cute little three-year-old somehow slipped your grasp when you weren’t watching and smoked cigarettes in an abandoned lot with God knows who, and it’s all you fault, you horrible, horrible negligent excuse for a parent.

“Uhhhh….is that from a song?” Mummy asks carefully.

“Yes,” Dubsie replies.

Silence as the adults do some hard thinking. Dubsie’s most violent song to date had been about an itsy-bitsy spider that made some bad choices involving a water spout, and now she’s hollering about wrecking balls and brains.

“Who taught it to you?” Mummy says sternly.

“Cousin Jane,” Dubsie replies.

Ahhhh. A sigh of relief. Jane is six years old and is no vector of malice. We learned later that “wrecking balls inside my brain” is a line from ‘Fight Song,’ a pop hit that had infected Dubsie’s cousin. It was also the anthem playing when Hillary Clinton walked on to the stage at the Democratic convention to accept her nomination. (Ha ha, doesn’t that seem like a utopia now.)

It is Dubsie’s first pop song, and she’s fallen hard. We can extract just about any concession from her if the reward involves playing ‘Fight Song’ on my iPhone.

The 3 minutes 25 seconds it plays is her sacred time to dance around the living room like a crazy person and sing to herself. Try to join in, or pump your fist in the air during the drum part, and she shuts you down with a “NO, Daddy!” This is her moment, her diva requiem, the first of many pop songs she will be unable to get out of her brain, and now neither can we.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/12/%ef%bb%bfwrecking-balls-inside-my-brain/feed/0Dangerous Timeshttp://theferrisfiles.com/2016/11/4644/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/11/4644/#commentsMon, 14 Nov 2016 18:56:27 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4644Dubsie holds a sign we found at the site of yesterday’s rally.

I wish this blog post was another meditation my adorable three-year-old daughter and the things she says and does. But I have to turn my attention instead to Donald Trump, who represents a very real danger to Dubsie’s future.

I wish this blog post was another meditation my adorable three-year-old daughter and the things she says and does. But I have to turn my attention instead to Donald Trump, who represents a very real danger to Dubsie’s future.

Dubsie is big and boisterous and smart — she just wrote her name for the first time — and I want to spend every spare moment soaking in her instead of in politics. She’s growing so fast that when I carry her up the stairs now, she can rest her feet comfortably on my thighs, like we’re two gym rats doing Stairmasters in tandem. Growing so fast that, this morning when she slept between me and my wife, her foot poked out and I mistook it for her mother’s.

You see, the problem I’m dealing with is that Dubsie’s skin is brown, or caramel anyway. Her mother is of Indian descent. We are card-carrying, flag-flying members the multicultural brigade. We celebrate Christmas alongside Diwali, and I speak exclusively Spanish to Dubsie, even though it’s not my native language, because language is a window into another world, and I want her to experience a diversity of worlds.

Yesterday president-elect Trump made his very first senior-level appointments and it became clear that diversity is not among his values. He has appointed Steve Bannon as his chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon was the executive chairman of Breitbart, a right-wing news site that during the election fanned the flames of Trump more than anybody. Breitbart tells Black Lives Matter protesters that they should sit down and shut up, and says that if women don’t like being harassed online, they should just log off.

Yesterday we attended Dubsie’s first protest rally.

We live near Cal Anderson Park, right in the middle of Capitol Hill in Seattle, and on a wet and cloudy Sunday afternoon a lot of people had gathered there. The park was crowded but a strangely silent. Some were carrying signs but there was no cheering, no one yelling into a microphone, no one chanting. The central pond has been drained for maintenance, and in and around it stood about a thousand people. They were black and white and brown, gay and straight, men and women, some holding signs and some talking in small groups. A thousand people had taken time out of their busy Sunday afternoons to stand in a park in the rain.

The rally was leaderless. Occasionally someone would try to lead a song. A few people mumbled along with ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘This Land is Your Land’ but it was clear that this is a generation that isn’t used to raising its voice. One lead singer, an older guy in horn-rimmed glasses and a scarf, stumbled through a verse of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ before singing and I don’t know the words… which made everyone laugh.

After going home we caught Trump’s interview on 60 Minutes, which was his first real sit-down since the election. It teased some clarity from his usual muddle of contradictory statements. He really does intend to round up and deport 2 to 3 million illegal immigrants from Latin America, and he actually intends to build a wall with Mexico. Turns out he wasn’t kidding; he wasn’t saying some outrageous thing in order to curry votes. He has made it clear that his top priority is building a giant, multibillion-dollar wall to keep brown people out. Dubsie and her mother aren’t Mexican, but it’s nonetheless feeling like a dangerous time to be brown.

Dubsie and I will be attending protest rallies in the coming weeks, and I hope you will be as well. I created this blog to document Dubie’s life so when she’s older she can look back at these posts and know her childhood. Right now it’s most important that we ensure that the United States of America remains a country where she feels welcome.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/11/4644/feed/2My First Nemesishttp://theferrisfiles.com/2016/09/my-first-nemesis/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/09/my-first-nemesis/#commentsThu, 29 Sep 2016 03:23:59 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4638Dubsie’s first bully is a boy with long silky brown hair, a wearer of berets and vests and gaily colored pants, who yanked hard on Dubsie’s earring when she had been at her new preschool only a few days. Let’s call him Newman.

Dubsie was not going to let bygones be bygones. “There,” she told [...]

]]>Dubsie’s first bully is a boy with long silky brown hair, a wearer of berets and vests and gaily colored pants, who yanked hard on Dubsie’s earring when she had been at her new preschool only a few days. Let’s call him Newman.

Dubsie was not going to let bygones be bygones. “There,” she told me for days thereafter, stabbing her finger at a corner of the preschool playroom like a victim replaying the crime for the sergeant. “There. That’s where Newman pullded my earring. Right there.”

I tried to like Newman. I made a point of talking to him when I visited during the Photography module (each week has a theme at this new school, like Water or Camping or Things that Are Gooey, and one week was Photography, or as Dubsie calls it, FER…TOG…GER…FEE). Dubsie came home with the notion that there are only three conceivable objects of fer-tog-ger-fee: Nature, Animals and People.

I asked a classmate, Gabby, what she would take pictures of on their upcoming field trip.

“Flowers!” she said.

What would Hazel take pictures of?

“People!” Hazel cried.

How about you, Newman?

“POOP!” he yelled.

Dubsie reports that Newman acts out in class, in ways that are not ‘propriate, as she says. He is always getting in trouble. He calls Dubsie “Stupid Dubsie.” One day I dropped Dubsie with a card she’d received from a friend that she wanted to show to her classmates. Before she could, Newman ran to his cubby to get a card of his own.”My card is more beautifuller,” he said, again and again, as if he were channeling a certain presidential candidate.

So we try to be good parents. We teach Dubsie the value of forbearance, even if she can’t pronounce “forbearance” yet, and prepare her for the inevitability that Newman is just the first of a long line of bullies and creeps and chowderheads who will make life difficult. We counsel her her to be kind, and forgiving, and nice, and to ignore Daddy when he grits his teeth and clenches his fist and yells “Newman!” and chuckles to himself.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/09/my-first-nemesis/feed/0The ﻿Toothbrush Confessionshttp://theferrisfiles.com/2016/09/%ef%bb%bftoothbrush-confessions/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/09/%ef%bb%bftoothbrush-confessions/#commentsMon, 19 Sep 2016 19:43:11 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4633Dubsie doesn’t like to talk about her day. Ask her what she did at preschool and she says “Nothing!” or ignores the question and goes back to her Legos, a miniature teenager who hasn’t yet learned to sulk.

At night when it’s time for dental hygiene, I float a toothbrush in her direction and get [...]

]]>Dubsie doesn’t like to talk about her day. Ask her what she did at preschool and she says “Nothing!” or ignores the question and goes back to her Legos, a miniature teenager who hasn’t yet learned to sulk.

At night when it’s time for dental hygiene, I float a toothbrush in her direction and get the same thing as always: a closed mouth. She purses her lips and for good measure claps a palm over them. I ponder whether forced toothbrushing leaves scars on the gums, or the psyche. I take a breath and necessity is the mother of invention I adopt a high and feminine voice. I become a toothbrush ventriloquist. This is a girl toothbrush, apparently, and it speaks Spanish. (As do I, badly.)

Dubsie’s keeps her hand clamped over her jaws, but she eyes the toothbrush curiously. The toothbrush calls her name again. Dubsie. I cock the head of the toothbrush to one side like an adorable Disney character. Dubsie? I touch its bristles ever so gently against the back of her hand and make a loud kissing sound. Dubsie’s hand drops. She opens her mouth and asks a question.

“What is your name?” she demands of the toothbrush.

Uhhhh…

¡Cepillo! says the toothbrush. (That is the word for ‘brush’ in Spanish.)

Dubsie opens her mouth and lets Cepillo in for a few strokes, which makes Cepillo practically swoon with excitement, which persuades Dubsie to allow a few more strokes, at which point we’re done, at which point Cepillo, in her lilting voice, thanks Dubsie profusely for the privilege of brushing her teeth, and says she can’t wait to see her again tomorrow.

The next day it is Cepillo, not Daddy, who starts the toothbrushing in her chipmunk Spanish, and Cepillo — not looking for an actual answer, just hoping for an open mouth — asks Dubsie what she did at school that day.

“Cepillo!” Dubsie says, seizing the toothbrush with both hands and looking it right in the bristles. “Today I played with Gabby and with Hazel. We played with MagnaTiles!”

¿De veras? ¡Dime mas! (“Really? Tell me more!”)

“And then we goed out on the playground and we played with jump ropes!”

¡Wow! Cepillo replied.

So this is how toothbrushing goes now. Dubsie and her Cepillo are confidantes. It takes only a few strokes for Dubsie to grab the toothbrush from my hand and say “Cepillo!” and then sigh because she doesn’t even know how to start, there’s so much to tell about her day. We’ve traded one problem for another; now a simple bedtime ritual can take all night.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/09/%ef%bb%bftoothbrush-confessions/feed/1I love you, but I don’t like youhttp://theferrisfiles.com/2016/03/i-love-you-but-i-dont-like-you/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/03/i-love-you-but-i-dont-like-you/#commentsFri, 11 Mar 2016 07:37:26 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4624This is what Dubsie is telling me this week. She goes on to add that she loves Mummy and she likes Mummy. Then she tells me again, in case it wasn’t clear the first time, that she loves me but doesn’t like me.

When pressed for details (by Mummy, object of all affection) she divulges [...]

]]>This is what Dubsie is telling me this week. She goes on to add that she loves Mummy and she likes Mummy. Then she tells me again, in case it wasn’t clear the first time, that she loves me but doesn’t like me.

When pressed for details (by Mummy, object of all affection) she divulges that Daddy is in her bad graces because he makes scary faces. Mummy is in her good graces because she makes funny faces.

She is old enough to know that Daddy is a boy and Mummy is a girl. Dubsie is a girl, and that makes her like a little Mummy. Mummy is married to Daddy. Mummy and Daddy love each other, but sometimes they fight and they don’t seem to like each other. It’s all very confusing, the liking and the loving.

After informing me how little I am liked (and if we happen to be lying down), Dubsie buries her head in my neck and inserts her palm under my shoulder, which is her current favored form of cuddling. (That and squeezing my earlobe and yelling “pinchy pinchy!”) I am happy to be part of her exploration of loving versus liking, but do nothing to aid the distinction by telling her that I love her and I like her very much.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/03/i-love-you-but-i-dont-like-you/feed/0Rhymes with Cupidhttp://theferrisfiles.com/2016/02/rhymes-with-cupid/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/02/rhymes-with-cupid/#commentsThu, 11 Feb 2016 05:57:22 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4603The email said that parents ought to send their kids to school with Valentines. Twenty valentines, to be exact, so no one’s heart is broken. At least that’s what Mummy told me the email said. I never saw the email, ok maybe I saw it and didn’t read it, or maybe there was something about [...]

]]>The email said that parents ought to send their kids to school with Valentines. Twenty valentines, to be exact, so no one’s heart is broken. At least that’s what Mummy told me the email said. I never saw the email, ok maybe I saw it and didn’t read it, or maybe there was something about Valentines, I can’t remember, busy day. Which prompts Mummy to turn to Daddy and say YOU NEVER PAY ATTENTION TO ANYTHING.

You want to be the parent who sends your kid to school with Valentines and at the same time you are thinking Oh Lord here’s another frigging thing. It is late in the week and we have exactly one more night to fulfill our Valentine’s obligation, and Mummy says OK here’s what we’ll do. Goldfish crackers.

Goldfish crackers on Valentine’s Day? I said.

Goldfish crackers. We’ll put them in little bags with a heart on it with Dubsie’s name.

So fine. Like I have a better idea. This morning I wake up at 5:45 a.m. to make a digital document of 20 little heart shapes with “From Dubsie” in the middle. No time for decorating; that we outsource to Dubsie and her nanny. But we’re still don’t have twist ties to close the bags, or the goldfish.

Near the end of the workday and I am still empty-handed. Where to find goldfish and twist ties in my neighborhood is not exactly straightforward. Does Office Depot carry twist ties? No. But it turns out the Cash & Carry (a restaurant supply store across the street) does. One down.

The only viable outlet for goldfish crackers is Trader Joe’s, which is chock full of reasonably priced and delightful foodstuffs but might or might not have the exact thing you’re looking for. And they don’t have goldfish crackers. They have a wide assortment of candies, but the email (which I hadn’t read) apparently said that you can’t bring those. They have crackers in the shape of rockets. That’s sort of like a goldfish cracker, in that it is orange and bland and has nothing whatsoever to do with Valentine’s Day. But they also don’t look very much like rockets. So I take tour through the flavored popcorn, like cheddar and cracker jacks, but the labels says This Product Was Made in a Factory Where a Lineworker Once Thought About A Nut.

We had learned the hard way about nuts in school when we sent an entire Kringle (a Swedish pastry that resembles a Danish but is the size of a dinner plate) to school for the children to enjoy and maybe learn about Sweden. But because it was garnished with some sliced almonds, and because one kid had a nut allergy, they couldn’t feed it to anybody. We heard it wound up in the teacher’s lounge.

So finally I buy a bag of cheese puffs, because who doesn’t like cheese puffs, and assume that everything is cool until Mummy gets home and surveys my purchases and informs me that YOU NEVER PAY ATTENTION TO ANYTHING. What, one bag of fake Cheetos? To feed twenty children?

It’s a snack, I argue. A notion. A gesture of fondness for a gaggle of children whose names Dubsie can’t recall no many how times we ask her. So we are short on Cheetos but more than make up for it in twist ties, because when you buy twist ties from a restaurant supply store you get a lot of them. We drop perhaps nine Cheetos into every bag and then tie the bag with one of our roughly six thousand twist ties.

Which holds some important lesson about love and life. Because Cheetos are fleeting (especially when you only have nine of them), and love may be fleeting, but these damn twist ties, we’ll never get rid of them.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/02/rhymes-with-cupid/feed/6New Stratagemshttp://theferrisfiles.com/2016/01/new-stratagems/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/01/new-stratagems/#commentsThu, 07 Jan 2016 06:55:12 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4588A game of hide-and-seek with Dubsie is over almost before it begins. Instruct her to hide, cover eyes, count to ten. Open your eyes and she is ‘hiding’ square in a doorway, or her butt is sticking out from behind the couch. Before I can even pretend to look for her, she rushes out. “I [...]

]]>A game of hide-and-seek with Dubsie is over almost before it begins. Instruct her to hide, cover eyes, count to ten. Open your eyes and she is ‘hiding’ square in a doorway, or her butt is sticking out from behind the couch. Before I can even pretend to look for her, she rushes out. “I hided and you found me!” she yells.

Oh, wait, that was last week. This week she didn’t rush out to be found. She crouched motionless and silent. Something has changed. She has grasped the principle of stealth. The web of deceit has begun to spin. A bit of intelligence got lodged within her when I wasn’t looking, and she has a new stratagem.

She’ll get hold of contraband, say an extra-long roll of wrapping paper, and wave it around like a light saber the way her cousin showed her over Christmas. To manage this annoyance I do what has always worked with her — reach out and snatch it from her befuddled hand.

But before I can grasp it she’s on the run.

She runs as fast as she can, holding her cardboard sword precariously aloft, from kitchen to living room to dining room, the diaper lines on her rump twitching back and forth with every tiny step. She starts to giggle as I close in. You gotted me! she says when I snatch her up and and tickle her belly. You gotted meeeeeee….

You gotted me. A few weeks ago Dubsie figured out that she can talk about what happened by adding an -ed. Another fragment of reason snaps into place.

Mummy kisted me and her teacher saided something funny and she takeded her pet monkey to bed after the Christmas presents were giveded. Bananas are not peeled but peelded; milk is not drunk but drinkded. It’s an adorable mistake we wouldn’t imagine correcting, like when she tries to say cannot but instead manages cannit, in our bed in the dead of night when she won’t stop talking:

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2016/01/new-stratagems/feed/0A Miniature Girl and Two Anxious Reindeerhttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/12/a-miniature-girl-and-two-anxious-reindeer/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/12/a-miniature-girl-and-two-anxious-reindeer/#commentsSat, 26 Dec 2015 03:07:21 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4579When I heard that two reindeer would make an appearance at Swansons, our local garden store, I knew this was an opportunity not to be missed. “Reindeer!” I told Dubsie, who looked at me blankly, owing to her never having heard the word before. “You’ll get to feed reindeer! Aren’t you excited?”

]]>When I heard that two reindeer would make an appearance at Swansons, our local garden store, I knew this was an opportunity not to be missed. “Reindeer!” I told Dubsie, who looked at me blankly, owing to her never having heard the word before. “You’ll get to feed reindeer! Aren’t you excited?”

We parked in the lot and followed the stream of children and parents entering into the nursery. To the left past the thickets of Christmas trees for sale was the reindeer pen, strewn with hay. The duo of reindeer had matching red bridles, and a sign outside that said their names were Dasher and Blitzen. This morning they appeared to be neither dashing nor prancing, but rather sulking, on the extreme far end of their pen away from the children.

We arrived just in time for the orientation talk from a Swansons employee, a cheerful blonde a red beret cap, who told the children some surprising facts about reindeer, such as that their horns fall off at the end of every year. She let the kids stroke the reindeer pelt that draped her podium. It fell to her to break the bad news that there would be no feeding of the reindeer today. Dasher and Blitzen had been fed by a few too many children in the last few days, she said, and too much food had made them grumpy. And that’s why, she added, the reindeers’ poops had been prodigious and spectacular of late.

As a consolation prize, she said, today’s visitors could feed the Curley, the Christmas camel. I had been so excited at the sight of the reindeer that I hadn’t noticed the enormous beast loitering in the next manger. Our blonde master of ceremonies grabbed a loaf of bread and the children lined up to feed Curley.

I let the other kids have their go at Curley and carried Dubsie over to have a closer look at the reindeer. Just as I plonked Dubsie down on the ground, one of them broke from the huddle on the far side of the pen and cruised right by us. Dubsie shrieked and ran into my arms.

Now, to be fair, reindeer are a little strange looking. Their horns are long and baroque, bristling with sharp tips like a thorn bush, and their eyes have a wild staring quality. Dasher, or maybe it was Blitzen, cocked his head and ogled Dubsie from the far corner of his eye, with the white showing, which made him look over-caffeinated or maybe terrified, which perhaps he was, being obliged to snatch food from so many small grubby hands. Or perhaps pulling an overburdened sleigh piloted by a hollering old fat man carries a psychological toll about which carols are not written.

So my daughter is terrified of reindeer. Merry Christmas. Maybe she’ll do better with the camel. Camels, as it happens, make excellent feeding-zoo creatures, because they have extremely long lips that can pluck bread crust out of a child’s hand with great gentleness and dexterity.

The children had all fed their strips of bread to the camel. Now it was Dubsie’s turn. The woman handed the bread to Dubsie, who looked for a long moment at the gentle beast above her, and determined there was a wiser course of action. She politely handed the bread back to the professional camel-handler, who gave it to the camel on Dubsie’s behalf.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/12/a-miniature-girl-and-two-anxious-reindeer/feed/0Her Royal Rumpness http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/her-royal-rumpness/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/her-royal-rumpness/#commentsMon, 28 Sep 2015 05:57:12 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4571Every toddler has a favorite activity, like playing with trains or jumping on the bed or shrieking while turning in circles. I have observed closely and determined what Dubsie’s favorite activity is. She craves a good sit.

]]>Every toddler has a favorite activity, like playing with trains or jumping on the bed or shrieking while turning in circles. I have observed closely and determined what Dubsie’s favorite activity is. She craves a good sit.

The princess in her many states of repose.

The first thing she does upon entering a room is to scope out the best spot to park her ample buttocks. Usually it’s the couch. She attacks it frontally, flinging her arms and tummy onto the cushions for traction and then swinging a leg up. Having expended all that gymnastic effort, it’s time to take a load off. She finds a spot, not by the arm rest or quite in the middle, but just off to the side, usually in the most plump part of a cushion, and settles in, with posture erect and her legs crossed at the ankles.

But the task is only half-done. Her next job is to find you a place to sit. “Sit!” she’ll say. “You sit right there,” and points to another piece of furniture, a rocker or a comfortable settee perhaps, so you two can relax and catch up. If you comply, she rewards you with a satisfied grin.

A sure way to annoy her is to mess with the assigned seating. Once we had a group of eight people over for brunch and Dubsie presided from her high chair at the foot of the table. When the eating was done, people got up to drop off their plates and came back to mingle with people not their seat mates. Dubsie found this intolerable. “No, Guha, sit!” she barked at her 10-year-old cousin, and pointed to his old seat across the table. But then her grandfather, Thatha — her own grandfather! — plopped himself down in Guha’s chair, and that got her really flummoxed. “No, Thatha! You sit there!” she yelled, pointing to Thatha’s old seat.

Once we realized how annoyed she was by musical chairs, we switched seats at random, just to see her get worked up.

Dubsie’s favorite station at the playground is the swing, where she can chill out and be pushed all the live long day. She won’t climb the stairs if she can instead situate her royal rumpness in the crook of Daddy’s arm. One would call it laziness if it weren’t accompanied by such delight.

I would prefer she be more active, but who am I to say? Since she is already getting so much practice at it, maybe one day she’ll be telling a jury to please be seated.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/her-royal-rumpness/feed/0Circles in the Airhttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/circles-in-the-air/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/circles-in-the-air/#commentsSun, 20 Sep 2015 07:44:43 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4562At the Washington State Fair I gave Dubsie her first-ever sip of Coca-Cola. She raised her eyebrows. “Spicy!” she exclaimed. “Could I have some more?”

If the straw wandered anywhere near her mouth, it was sucked upon until forcefully withdrawn. I also fed her French fries and the breaded crust of a corn dog. This [...]

]]>At the Washington State Fair I gave Dubsie her first-ever sip of Coca-Cola. She raised her eyebrows. “Spicy!” she exclaimed. “Could I have some more?”

If the straw wandered anywhere near her mouth, it was sucked upon until forcefully withdrawn. I also fed her French fries and the breaded crust of a corn dog. This was a wild departure from her usual healthy regimen of oatmeal, veggies, and sensible low-fat meats like chicken and turkey. “My stomach feels so yummy!” she yelled as we hurried toward the Ferris wheel.

Yes, the Ferris wheel. “Your namesake!” I told Dubsie. (Though no genealogical research has yet linked us to George Washington Ferris, the man who invented the Ferris wheel for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Since it was a fair, however, we can be sure there was junk food.) Dubsie had been reading a book from the library called Mr. Ferris and His Wheel, so when I pointed at the steel circle looming overhead and told her what it was, she was thrilled.

She and I were the first people to board, so we got to spend the most time in the air, jolting higher, higher, a little higher, after every subsequent car boarded. Dubsie grasped the back of her bench and stared at the lights of the mechanical octopus and of the roller coaster and at the barns where earlier in the day she had met her first piglet, her first downy yellow chicks and her first Angora rabbit.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/circles-in-the-air/feed/0A Long Walkhttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/a-long-walk/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/a-long-walk/#commentsMon, 14 Sep 2015 02:28:50 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4553We took Dubsie camping on the Olympic Peninsula this weekend. This peninsula is one of the wettest places in the country, where the drizzle never stops, but somehow we hit a bullseye. Three straight days of sun. Mountains thrusting into the blue, and mossy glades threaded with soft light.

]]>We took Dubsie camping on the Olympic Peninsula this weekend. This peninsula is one of the wettest places in the country, where the drizzle never stops, but somehow we hit a bullseye. Three straight days of sun. Mountains thrusting into the blue, and mossy glades threaded with soft light.

One day we had Dubsie lead us on a hike. The Heart O’ the Forest Trail takes off from the Heart O’ the Hills campground (we coached Dubsie how to say “Heart O’ the Hills!’ like a leprechaun). The Heart O’ the Forest is full of trees that are so tall and thick that I took them for vagabond California redwoods, until a ranger informed me they were western red spruce and Douglas fir, specimens that had been reaching toward the gray sky for a thousand years or more, untroubled by the whack of axes.

Dubsie picked her way through root banks, and stayed upright on damp wooden bridges that crossed swamps of broadleaves. She meandered like a creek, touching every stone and root. We plucked branchlets off the ferns. We watched beetles scuttle under leaves and spiderwebs shimmering in a late afternoon glow.

In a few hours I’d say she walked a mile, which is a far piece for someone who’s two. On the way back she got hungry and weepy, so I carried her.

Mummy made dinner while I coaxed some damp kindling into a fire. Dubsie was fascinated by the smoke. “I’m making a campfire, my love,” I told her. “We will make lots of these, you and me.”

Night fell and the fire crackled. Dubsie sat her her chair and stared into the flames. Whether exhausted by the walk or entranced by fire, I don’t know, but she sat perfectly still and didn’t say a word. Mummy asked if she wanted to be held, and she answered with a peep.

Mummy cradled her as if she were still a little baby. Dubsie’s head fell back into the crook of her mother’s arm and she was instantly asleep.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/a-long-walk/feed/0A Summer of Disquiethttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/a-summer-of-disquiet/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/a-summer-of-disquiet/#commentsMon, 07 Sep 2015 05:11:03 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4546Readers, sorry to take until nearly Thanksgiving to inform you of events that happened in summer. This post was especially hard to write, and came as I entered a busy patch that caused me to fall behind.

The weather has been alarmingly pleasant since we moved to Seattle. The first week in our new [...]

]]>Readers, sorry to take until nearly Thanksgiving to inform you of events that happened in summer. This post was especially hard to write, and came as I entered a busy patch that caused me to fall behind.

The weather has been alarmingly pleasant since we moved to Seattle. The first week in our new house, the mercury topped 90 degrees for five days, shattering the historical record. Seattle has literally never had this warm of a summer. Welcome to Los Angeles. The rain jacket we’d planned for Dubsie to wear has stayed in the closet. Instead she dons sandals and high-SPF sunscreen.

For the next few weeks the sun rises day after day into an untroubled blue sky. I take Dubsie down to Golden Gardens, the beachfront park near our house, and lazily push her back and forth. Across Puget Sound, the Olympic Mountains stand in bold, unclouded relief. Normally they are hidden in precipitation and when they do reveal themselves are clad in snow, but this year they are brown. Mummy grew up here and says she has never seen them that way.

Near the end of August the long string of sparkling days end, not with rain but a grayish-orange sky. The wind that normally blows off the Pacific has moved in reverse, bringing in smoke from the east, from the wildfires in the Cascade Mountains. The forest fires are the largest and hottest the state had ever seen; even the Olympic rainforest to the west, usually one of the wettest places on the continent, has its own blazes. The photos of Dubsie from that weekend have a ruddy evening light to them, though I take them at noon.

Then the weather manages a return to its time-honored pattern. A wet storm blows in, followed by a day or two of cloudy gloom, followed by another wet storm, and daytime temperatures drop into the sixties. Dubsie is compelled to wear socks.

Despite the rain, we stick with our plan to hike on Mt. Rainier this weekend. We drive out of Seattle and its brown lawns and up Highway 7, which takes us by Alder Lake, a reservoir on the western approach to the massive mountain. I’ve thought of Alder Lake as mysterious because it always seems to be swathed in mist. Today there is no mist, and moreover there is almost no water. The peaceful green shoreline has vanished. Instead there is a landscape of stumps, left over from when the reservoir was first filled. Alder Lake has become nothing more than a creek, wending through a boneyard. On the far bank a fire smolders.

We roll on into Mt. Rainier National Park, where things look enough like they usually do that we feel we can stop worrying. Tall strong mossy trees deck the roadside. We climb to Paradise, the park headquarters from which so many adventures are launched, which on average gets 53 feet of snow a year, but today there is none to be seen. The permanent glaciers that crown the mountain aren’t visible; a brow of clouds frowns just above us. We embark on a trail called Dead Horse, and the layer of clouds rises almost in tandem with our ascent.

Mummy and I taking turns carrying Dubsie. In some stretches she insists on walking, and sometimes she nearly runs, her toes turned out and her left arm tucked by her side as her right one swings. Her head lolls back and forth with each stride. She’s so new to running she hasn’t worked out the kinks. But she is running farther than before, and uphill, and when I scoop her up, breathing hard, she says to me I will go there, pointing upward in the direction of the peak we can’t see.

The goal today is a point on the map known as the overlook of the Nisqually Glacier, one of 20 glaciers that makes Rainier the most ice-capped peak in the contiguous United States. We climb and climb but no sign of ice yet. It isn’t until we are nearly upon the official outlook that we finally see the the tail of the glacier, sticking out from underneath the blanket of clouds. Below it, stretching for thousands of vertical feet, is a valley of mud and stones that show us where the glacier used to be as it melted and retreated over the prior decades. It’s a forlorn sight, like the impression in the bed from a lover that’s gone away.

The view from the Nisqually Glacier overlook.

Back down we hike. Dubsie wants to run. She points her pigeon toes downhill and careens, nearly tripping, arms flailing, every stride a bloody nose nearly happening, and I race forward to grab her, to hold her back before anything bad happens, to use my grip for now to restrain a girl that is restlessly growing, to restrain clock that is endlessly spinning, to restrain a thermometer that is relentlessly rising, the unstoppable forces that are pulling my daughter out of my grasp and toward a future of muddy, iceless slopes, of burning forests, of acrid smoky skies. I hold her tighter because I sense that a larger hand has released itself from the wheel, and we are careening toward God knows where.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/09/a-summer-of-disquiet/feed/1Dubsie’s Manifestohttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/08/dubsies-manifesto/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/08/dubsies-manifesto/#commentsMon, 24 Aug 2015 05:24:23 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4516Like so many amazing childhood events, this one arose from the most mundane of circumstances. Dubsie played in the bathroom while Mummy and I were organizing toiletries. Dubsie started rooting through a box on the floor that contained toothbrushes (known in Spanish as cepillos), toothpaste, various shampoo bottles, and her Ergo (a type of baby [...]

]]>Like so many amazing childhood events, this one arose from the most mundane of circumstances. Dubsie played in the bathroom while Mummy and I were organizing toiletries. Dubsie started rooting through a box on the floor that contained toothbrushes (known in Spanish as cepillos), toothpaste, various shampoo bottles, and her Ergo (a type of baby carrier).

Not wanting to see our toothbrushes turned into floor scrubbers, nor our shampoo used as finger paint, I grabbed the box and put it out of her reach on a ledge in the shower.

Dubsie whimpered the way she does when we have committed an injustice. She turned toward her mother and, with tears in her voice, lodged the following compliant.

“Da-a-a-a-ady took za box and a wahna and zzz ergo is innere an i pick it up and i just wahna cepillo and plaaaay gah nah brusha teeth and waaaaaaaaaaaa na play in it an d-dad go an I wahna play za lil piece and just cuz go weeee an my ergo is innere nah nice an shower on na floor and d-dad take it awaaaaaaay.”

Mummy and I looked at her with open mouths. That was four or five times more words than we had ever heard her say at once. We turned toward each other and burst out laughing. It wasn’t just a sentence — it was a whole diatribe, and I was proud of my daughter for articulating herself so passionately, for lodging a protest with tears in her eyes and while wearing a set of elephant onesie pajamas.

At 3 a.m., Dubsie will wake up in her room and rattle the baby gate until she gets what she wants. What she wants is to be carried to our bed, the warm cushy king bed, and installed between her parents. [...]

At 3 a.m., Dubsie will wake up in her room and rattle the baby gate until she gets what she wants. What she wants is to be carried to our bed, the warm cushy king bed, and installed between her parents. You’d think there’d plenty of room in king bed for two adults and a toddler.

We plop her in the the textbook position — head to headboard, foot to footboard — and offer certain inducements for staying there, such as her own little pillow and the company of her stuffed monkey, Hoho, but really the sleep acrobatics show is just beginning.

She’ll climb up over the bluff of the comforter and end up fully inverted, head somewhere down near our knees, and burrow deep into the bedding, as if dropped from a height, so in the morning only her rump is visible when I open my eyes. Other times she spoons Mummy and affectionately thrusts her head backward into Mummy’s nose, which makes Mummy hyperextend her own neck so she starts the new day with a crick.

But most often she will rotate 90 degrees, stretch herself to full length between our heads, and force us both to the edges. I often wake up with Dubsie’s skull firmly wedged beneath my cheekbone, as if to prevent any part of me from touching my wife. Meanwhile she will, in a preview of her adolescent years, kick her mother in the face.

It’s probably time for an intervention for our little interventionist.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/08/somethings-come-between-us/feed/0The Potty Partyhttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/08/potty-party/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/08/potty-party/#commentsMon, 10 Aug 2015 05:46:37 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4403The good news is that Dubsie is well on her way to being potty trained. The downside is that this requires more time and vigilance than the days when toilet management meant changing a full diaper. We must get her to the baño regularly, every 90 minutes or so, whether or not she wants to, [...]

]]>The good news is that Dubsie is well on her way to being potty trained. The downside is that this requires more time and vigilance than the days when toilet management meant changing a full diaper. We must get her to the baño regularly, every 90 minutes or so, whether or not she wants to, or has any particular business to attend to.

The sessions can be lengthy. Dubsie enjoys sitting, and when on the throne she has the additional bonus of an adult’s undivided attention. In order not to spend all afternoon sitting on the bathroom floor, we have learned certain ways to, um, move things along.

If we think she’s on the way to a #1, we whisper to her a soft pssst pssst pssst. If it seems more like a #2, we mimic what she does when she is pushing one out. Look her in the eye, hold your breath, strain your face until it’s purple, and make little grunting noises. Which mostly Dubsie just thinks is funny (“Make the potty face!” she’ll say), but other times it leads to the successful, and strangely fascinating, passage of poop into the toilet.

At which point I’m ready to move on. “All done?” I say, and reach for her armpits to hoist her down. “No, there’s more!” she says and waves my hands off. She smiles at me and kicks her legs in an amused way, and I resume my position sitting on the cold tile floor, with no way of knowing if I am facilitating an important skill, or if I am being played.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/08/potty-party/feed/1Sleight of Handhttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/08/sleight-of-hand/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/08/sleight-of-hand/#commentsSun, 02 Aug 2015 18:50:20 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4391I am, truth be told, a mediocre sort of person when it comes to hand washing. I disregard the signs that are in every public bathroom these days, instructing good citizens to spend 20 seconds scrubbing every nook and cranny and an additional 10 seconds rinsing. Personally I can pump-soap-rub-palms-splash-water-scrunch-a-towel in about five seconds, and [...]

]]>I am, truth be told, a mediocre sort of person when it comes to hand washing. I disregard the signs that are in every public bathroom these days, instructing good citizens to spend 20 seconds scrubbing every nook and cranny and an additional 10 seconds rinsing. Personally I can pump-soap-rub-palms-splash-water-scrunch-a-towel in about five seconds, and after years of doing so I’ve probably saved far more time than I’ll ever spend fighting off staphylococcus.

So it’s ironic that I have made myself policeman when it comes to Dubsie washing her hands. I insist on proctoring her trips to the bathroom. Not that Dubsie finds this burdensome. She loves washing her hands, and is so eager to hit the sink that I have to persuade her to wait to wash until after she’s used the toilet.

First we get our hands wet, I tell my eager novitiate. And then we squeeze some soap, and then we rub the palms together.

OK! She says, and her hands rub back and forth, getting all sudsy and adorable.

Now get your thumb! Now get the other thumb!

I proudly note that she knows where her thumbs are — what a smart little girl! — and so much more dextrous than last month.

Now let’s rub the backs of our hands!

(I have no idea why I insist on such a pointless activity)

Now we bring the fingers together, and scrub scrub scrub!

She scrub scrub scrubs, and I am absurdly proud to be an advocate for proper hand hygiene, though my pride has less to do with warding off disease and more to do with something else. Maybe this ritual ablution will produce a Ferris Version 2.0, an update with the bugs fixed, a person who will give regularly to charity and keep her hands on the steering wheel at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock and won’t fall asleep in calculus. There we go with the rinse, sweetie. Rub rub rub with the towel. All sparkling clean.

]]>I keep asking Dubsie if she wants to throw rocks in the Sound, and the answer comes back a stubborn no.

We are living for the week in a cabin on a beach on Camano Island. Camano is one of the islands of the archipelago that occupies Puget Sound. We have just moved from Washington D.C. to Seattle, which also sits on the Sound. In our new lives we will be constantly looking at and visiting this body of water.

The beach isn’t a Californian’s idea of a beach. No pillowy drifts of fine sand, but gravel and rocks, millions of rocks, many worn to roundness and in shades of gray to amber. And shells. The broken carapaces of bivalves are everywhere, reminding you that under the stones is a tangy menagerie of mussels and clams and a gigantic local delicacy called the geoduck. Silently filtrating saltwater in the darkness beneath your slightly uncomfortable butt.

Dubsie won’t only not throw rocks in the water; she won’t even go over the low concrete wall and onto the beach unless she’s carried. Set her down and she flails her arms for rescue. Maybe it’s hard to traverse those rocks in little, Teva-clad feet.

But the source of her disorientation could also be the water. It stretches for more than two miles to the far shore. At first I thought that demarcated the far side of the Sound, but no, it’s just the shore of another island, called Whidbey, and beyond that the Sound rolls on for miles and more miles.

What is a sound, anyway?

I take iPhone in hand and look it up. Wikipedia says it is “a large sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, and wider than a fjord.”

Oh, well, that clears it up.

So I punch “Puget Sound” into Google Maps. Someday when Dubsie is older she will have lots of questions about Puget Sound, and a father must be prepared. But even that is not much help. My screen shows a blue spidery maze of bays and channels and inlets. The inlets are so long and convoluted that I have to follow shorelines with my finger to distinguish island from mainland.

Puget Sound. Image courtesy of David Rumsey.

Where does the ocean come in? In the northwestern quadrant of the map the world gets more watery, so that’s the direction the Pacific lies. But I can’t see it. In order to find the ocean I expand my view of Google’s map again, then again, and then again. Broaden out from Puget Sound and one finds that it’s merely the southwestern fringe of a colossal inlet that extends deep into Canada, nearly halfway to Alaska. The Canadian portion is called the Strait of Georgia, defining the shore of British Columbia and its massive satellite, Vancouver Island, and is spangled with enough archipelagoes and channels and shorelines for Riya to explore for a lifetime.

Feeding it all, almost due west of where Riya and I stand, is the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a channel funneling straight to the North Pacific. It is ten miles wide at its narrowest. Ten miles wide! That’s when I realize that it is ocean, nearly pure raw ocean, lapping up gently on this stony shore. Seagulls laze overhead, and if you paddling offshore, you see schools of jellyfish.

Which is a long way of saying that Dubsie was not the only one taken aback by the bigness of it all.

The next week we visited our friend B, who lives in a house on a hill with a view of the Sound but also a stony little creek running through the backyard. Dubsie surprised me by asking to put her feet in it. It isn’t cold water or stones that overwhelms her. It’s the big water of the Sound that will take some getting used to.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/sounds-kinda-scary/feed/0The Grinch Who Stole Childhoodhttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/the-grinch-who-stole-childhood/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/the-grinch-who-stole-childhood/#commentsSun, 19 Jul 2015 19:17:47 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4381Note to readers: Your correspondent has fallen a bit behind as a blogger in the last few months, due to the tumult surrounding a cross-country move. Watch for a burst of posts in the next week or so.

An announcement, in case it’s not already known: Dubsie and Mummy and I are moving from Washington, [...]

]]>Note to readers: Your correspondent has fallen a bit behind as a blogger in the last few months, due to the tumult surrounding a cross-country move. Watch for a burst of posts in the next week or so.

An announcement, in case it’s not already known: Dubsie and Mummy and I are moving from Washington, D.C. to Seattle.

Moving sucks, of course, as it must when you’re stowing an entire family’s belongings into boxes and bubble wrap, but this is my first move that involves a child. I have become aware of the particular misery that the process inflicts upon a two-year old.

Dubsie sat on the stairs as I dismantled our first-floor baby gate. “What are you doing, daddy?” she asked.

“I’m taking this apart because we are moving to Seattle,” I replied. We’ve told her about the relocation a million times. She doesn’t understand it even a little bit. No surprise there: asking a toddler to comprehend leaving the only home she’s ever known is like expecting a chimp to do algebra. Add to that impenetrable idea the fact that the place we’re moving from and the one we’re moving to are both called Washington. Where do you live? we ask. “Washing DC,” she replies. Where are you moving to? “Washing DC,” she says.

Back on the steps, Dubsie said, “I want to stay here in Washing DC.”

“You could,” I said slowly, “but Mummy is moving to Seattle. And I am moving to Seattle. You don’t want to stay here all by yourself, do you?”

Dubsie looked back at me blankly. The prospect of moving and the prospect of being alone being equally impossible.

Crying fits come all the time this week, as the fixtures of daily existence disappear around her: the couch, the coffee table, the art on the wall. The place where the easy chair was is now a Tetris stack of UHaul boxes. She swings open the pantry door to find empty shelves; her dolls and piano and her collection of frogs are consolidated into crates, and then the crates vanish. Deny her the smallest of things, even a Chapstick tube, and we’re in for a fit. First she scrunches her face and her lips draw back into a painful rectangle, and she flaps her arms as a gale of blubbering is unleashed.

As I race toward the finish, clearing the rooms bare, I begin to feel like the Grinch Who Stole Childhood, who slithered and slunk, with a smile most unpleasant, around the whole room and took everything present. Hampers! And blankets! Bicycles! Drums! Bookshelves! Houseplants! Guitars! And Rugs!

Dubsie whimpers every time she glimpses the perspiring, hurried forms of me and Mummy going up and down the stairs. To avoid trauma we sequester her and her sitter in Dubsie’s bedroom, which is now denuded of all toys and other diversions. The crib is gone; all that remains is a mattress, and then in the last moments before the doors close, even that.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/the-grinch-who-stole-childhood/feed/0Trouble Afoothttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/trouble-afoot/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/trouble-afoot/#commentsSun, 12 Jul 2015 16:31:05 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4364Mummy and I have an ongoing difference of opinion regarding Dubsie’s feet, and whether they are to be celebrated or feared.

The thing is that Dubsie has big, fat feet. Observation of Dubsie’s ankle/arch/toe ratio indicates that either 1) this girl’s feet are still in a state of extreme baby chubbiness or 2) she has [...]

]]>Mummy and I have an ongoing difference of opinion regarding Dubsie’s feet, and whether they are to be celebrated or feared.

The thing is that Dubsie has big, fat feet. Observation of Dubsie’s ankle/arch/toe ratio indicates that either 1) this girl’s feet are still in a state of extreme baby chubbiness or 2) she has feet like mine, with the reputation that precedes them.

I have thick ankles, a low arch that causes an already wide foot to spread out even wider, and toes that are too small while also being too close together. One big toenail is only half-grown, owing to my having destroyed it by dropping a weight on it in the gym, and a pinkie nail is purple, from being stubbed against a chair leg. Then there’s the pale skin that makes the veins stand out, and the dark, irregular tufts of hair.

But, I retort. But. These are some great feet, in the way that my car (a 2005 Scion xB) is a great car. The original xB is one of the boxiest — and some would say ugliest — cars ever made. My friends regularly refer to it as The Toaster or The Hearse, and my buddy Les, who is a car buff, gets visibly angry every time he sees it. But that baby is reliable. Tons of storage space, loads of passenger room in rear, great mileage and huge windows. I can park it anywhere, and when I spin the little golf-cart-like steering wheel, it corners like a champ.

It also runs and runs and runs, which is exactly why it’s great to have these kind of feet. These feet have supported every step as I’ve climbed big peaks, surfed the chill waters of the North Pacific, played soccer and salsa danced, and (praise the gods) not a single sprained ankle.

None of which means a thing to Mummy, who has graceful ankles, dainty feet, and sensuously long toes, all wrapped in luminous soft skin. Her idea of a good foot is one that looks smashing in a strappy little sandal.

So Mummy worries that Dubsie is cultivating hobbit feet, as she calls mine, and wonder’s what she’ll think of her own feet in the flip-flop season. I look at Dubsie’s stubby little dogs and foresee a glorious life of adventure. If she’s lucky, the girl will have all the performance and also retain her mother’s good looks.

]]>http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/trouble-afoot/feed/2My Little Lagartijahttp://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/little-lagartija/
http://theferrisfiles.com/2015/07/little-lagartija/#commentsSun, 05 Jul 2015 17:20:59 +0000http://theferrisfiles.com/?p=4368Dubsie and I have a weekend workout routine. “¡La pista!” (“The track!”) I yell, and she claps her hands and dashes off to find her baby jogger.

With me in my Nikes and her in her five-point restraints, we run to Banneker Park, a public athletic multiplex on 7th Street with an odd-shaped track that [...]

]]>Dubsie and I have a weekend workout routine. “¡La pista!” (“The track!”) I yell, and she claps her hands and dashes off to find her baby jogger.

With me in my Nikes and her in her five-point restraints, we run to Banneker Park, a public athletic multiplex on 7th Street with an odd-shaped track that surrounds a baseball diamond. I narrate the laps because I worry about Dubsie getting bored. ¡Una vuelta! (One lap!) ¡Dos vueltas! ¡Catorce vueltas! Dubsie stares off into space or sings to herself. We comment on the other joggers, their shirt colors and whether they are moving fast or slow. Sometimes I pause to pluck her a dandelion or give her a water bottle. She feeds me a Cheerio.

When my run is over, I park the stroller in the grass and it’s time for Dubsie’s workout. We run on the lawn and hug a tree. We climb the steep grassy hill that fronts Seventh Street and say hi to the cars. Dubsie insists on wandering onto the track. “I do it myself,” she says. She careens from the slow lane to the fast lane, while Daddy waves off the passing sprinters. I do some squats, at the apex of which I fling Dubsie up in the air by her armpits, to much squealing.

Then it’s time for Dubsie’s favorite, which is lagartijas (lizards), the Spanish word for pushups. (Observe certain species of lizards and you will see they are always banging out a set.) Dubsie can’t do pushups yet — it’s very amusing to see her try —but she enjoys participating in mine.

“I am helping you, Daddy!” she hollers, and scoots to my side as I’m in the middle of forty reps and getting tired. She places both palms on the small of my back and presses down hard, all thirty pounds of her, and Daddy groans.